[HN Gopher] Show HN: Shepherd 3.0 - Like wandering the aisles of...
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Show HN: Shepherd 3.0 - Like wandering the aisles of your favorite
bookstore
Hi all, creator here :) - I launched Shepherd.com
(https://shepherd.com/) 3 years ago on Hacker News and have added a
ton since then! Here is the original Show HN
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660). I've interviewed
10,000+ authors & experts to get their 5 favorite reads around
different topics, themes, and moods. And I've connected those so
that you follow your curiosity around topics, authors, books, and
more. Try Art Kleiner's favorite reads on understanding AI and its
effect on people: https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-ai-
and-its-eff... Under each book, you can click "What is this book
about?" to explore different topics and genres that interest you. I
am working on adding themes and other fun connections. Or you can
explore things like... Places to explore if you like the book
Sapiens: https://shepherd.com/search/book/1504 S. B. Divya on her
favorite realistic near-future science fiction:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/realistic-near-future-scienc...
Places to explore if you like hard sci-fi:
https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/12622 Places to explore if you
like Stephen King: https://shepherd.com/search/author/4826 Azby
Brown's favorite books on Japanese carpentry and construction:
https://shepherd.com/best-books/japanese-carpentry-and-const...
Malayna Evan's favorite reads on badass women who left a mark on
the ancient world: https://shepherd.com/best-books/badass-women-
who-left-a-mark... Shepherd is bootstrapped, and I've got many
reader features coming soon! I have a newsletter about building the
project and early access to new features here:
https://forauthors.shepherd.com/newsletter-for-readers What do we
use to build this? Python, Django, Heroku, Postgre, Cloudflare,
NLP/ML for Wikipedia topic IDs via Wikifier (https://wikifier.org),
Nielsen's book API database (publisher data + Library of Congress
data), and Cloudinary. My email is ben@shepherd.com if you want to
share ideas or suggestions :) Thanks, Ben
Author : bwb
Score : 91 points
Date : 2024-04-19 07:18 UTC (1 days ago)
| bwb wrote:
| btw, here are some other fun explore points :)
|
| Sci-Fi -> https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/9008
|
| History -> https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/12669
|
| Fantasy -> https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/12664
|
| Behavioral economics -> https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/3105
|
| One HUGE challenge we have right now is that the publishers abuse
| their genre system, and the NLP/ML system I use for topic
| identification isn't great. I am working on a new system to
| bypass both of those and hope to roll that out later this year;
| that will drastically improve accuracy on topics/genres.
| geoffreypoirier wrote:
| Hi Ben. Great project. I'm playing with it right now in looking
| for "comps". Will ping with feedback.
| bwb wrote:
| Ya, a lot of publishers and publicists mention that :)
|
| As I launch reader reviews, I also want to feed into that; I
| plan to prompt them with "What book do you love that is like
| this book?" I think that is great for other readers and it
| helps give authors a true comp from the eyes of a reader (ETA
| late this year or early next I hope).
| joeconway wrote:
| I immediately found two books I'd not come across before, that I
| am going to start today. This is a great site, thank you
| bwb wrote:
| That is so great to hear! :)
|
| I am working on new bookshelf pages to expand that section. I
| want to add a more visual format and break it apart a bit more.
|
| Check out the early mockup here:
| https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mrvkev7pft5luvj10eqfc/Screens...
| slucaskim wrote:
| I absolutely love your domain!
| bwb wrote:
| Very lucky snag way back in the day :)
|
| I also own pilgrimage.com; I'd love to do something like this
| for music one day with the tagline, "Life is a journey; let's
| give it a soundtrack"!
| magnio wrote:
| I remember your first Show HN post. I was immediately hooked with
| what seems like a very diverse fivebooks alternative. Back then I
| thought it was like your hobby project and would probably fizzle
| out within a few months like many other projects, but nope, you
| just keep interviewing and making new lists days after days.
| Since then, clicking the shuffle button on your search site has
| become my favorite pastime :) Thank you for this site.
| bwb wrote:
| That is so nice to hear; thanks for gifting me with a huge
| smile today :)
|
| There have been some tough moments in the last year, especially
| with funding, but we are on a good path and I am having fun ->
| https://build.shepherd.com/p/shepherd-stress-path-forward
|
| Super excited to ship reader features soon!
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is cool--I mean it--but what do you mean you _interviewed_
| 10,000+ people in three years? How is that possible, given the
| number of hours in a day? Is it instead that you surveyed 10,000+
| people?
|
| I ask because fivebooks.com, which I suppose is a "competitor" of
| yours, actually does conduct interviews with people about the
| five books they choose on a subject, and it seems like a lot of
| work. They only do a couple a week, versus 12-13 a day.
| bwb wrote:
| With books, I really don't view anyone as a competitor; the
| goal should be to help readers find books, as they are the
| closest thing we have to magic.
|
| Five Books is doing great work, as is https://hardcover.app/
| and https://app.thestorygraph.com/. The more book websites we
| have in the world, the better the world; each one is doing
| things uniquely.
|
| I am super lucky to have a small part-time team that helps make
| the publishing process work ->
| https://forauthors.shepherd.com/team
|
| The publishing process works like this: -> We talk over email
| to see if they are a good fit and interested -> They fill out a
| Word doc and return it to us -> Bella & Joy add it to our
| system and start setting up the books/author profiles -> I
| screen each list personally for quality and fit (I learned a
| lot in the first year) -> Our fantastic editors, Frances and
| Lauren, edit and tweak everything. -> The author gets a
| preview, and we tweak and adjust as they see fit -> We schedule
| publishing once they are happy
|
| So, ya, not a video or audio interview, but we do a lot.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Ahh, okay. It was the "I" in "I interviewed" that confused
| me. I thought it was just you interviewing 13 people every
| weekday for three years, and maintaining the website by
| yourself. I think that would either be impossible, or a job
| fit only for a maniac. I understand now.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I love browsing Shepherd. The more specific lists crack me up but
| give me so many ideas. I also like that you can browse
| serendipitously tags related to just about any topic you can
| search. For example, search time travel -> click "Film", and now
| you've got a bunch of fun recommendations and you're also
| thinking about how you could combine those ideas in a new way in
| your own writing.
|
| https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/time-travel?topics=Q11424
|
| Hoping to be able to combine three ideas even more
| serendipitously in the future. You sort of can with multiple tags
| + a topic, but that feels like more of a filter than an
| additional idea right now.
| bwb wrote:
| Thanks! :)
|
| I am working to really improve the accuracy of genres & topics,
| and adding themes. I am hoping I can tackle that in 3 months or
| so...
| cluo21 wrote:
| When I travel, I love visiting old independent bookstores and
| wandering around to discover new books. The creakier the
| floorboards, the better. This is awesome - thank you!
| bwb wrote:
| I love indie bookstores :). I "stole" the original idea from a
| fantastic indie bookstore that I stumbled into.
|
| I walked into the bookstore, and they had little index cards to
| show off staff favorites and a little half-tweet on why: "Andy
| loves the characters in this outside-the-box fantasy series;-
| you will dig it."
|
| It was this magical way to meet the books. I thought it would
| be fun to try to do that while helping authors meet readers.
| lawrencegripper wrote:
| Perfecting timing, just finished my book.
|
| Loving the site, thankyou
| bwb wrote:
| Nice, let me know what you end up with :)
|
| Still a ton of rough spots, so feel free to send me any
| frustrations (ben@shepherd).
| WillAdams wrote:
| Why does searching for "mathematics" only provide specific texts?
| No general category/listing?
| bwb wrote:
| Ya, sorry, I have some issues with Algolia weighting; I am
| working on getting topics/genres to outrank author names as
| "math" is causing some problems there.
|
| Here is what should show up:
|
| Math bookshelf page - https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/math
|
| Math search results page -
| https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/693
| bangoodirro wrote:
| I thought this was about GNU shepherd but it's blog spam
| racional wrote:
| Except the selections of what you get to look at are made by an
| _algorithm_ , not people. Yes, an algorithm that mixes and
| matches ratings made by (a particular category of) people. But at
| the end of the day - an algorithm.
|
| So in this very fundamental sense, it's nothing like your local
| bookstore at all.
| bwb wrote:
| Hmm, can you explain?
|
| Every book on our website is chosen by a reader who loved it.
|
| Here is an example: https://shepherd.com/best-books/mystery-
| and-suspensewith-a-b...
|
| The only books within our website are those that a reader loves
| and picked as part of their book rec list, or fav 3 reads of
| the year.
| racional wrote:
| _Every book on our website is chosen by a reader who loved
| it._
|
| Yeah, we get that. It's the aggregate _ranking_ of such picks
| (taken across a large set of reviewers somehow) that I was
| referring to. That is, an algorithm.
|
| Which is, again, entirely different from how your local
| bookstore operates (for any store worth visiting, that is).
| bwb wrote:
| No, sorry, that is incorrect.
| racional wrote:
| Without explaining why. And then you walk off.
|
| But okay, I guess this this how you talk to people.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So ... 30 years ago when we were starting Amazon (I was employee
| #2 there), I had an idea for a feature I wanted in the initial
| store that is related to what you're trying to do here, but quite
| different.
|
| While I value human curation, and it probably has to come first,
| what I wanted to do was to take the LoC classification for a book
| (typically a triple that has 3 levels of specificity) and build a
| multidimensional search "space" where you could find books close
| to the one you were looking at.
|
| In 1994, alas, the LoC data was only available via an insanely
| slow modem-based download, which made it unusable. The main data
| source we were using back then (Baker & Taylor / Books in Print)
| sadly fucked up their record of the LoC classification to that it
| was impossible to infer where the gaps between the triple's parts
| were.
|
| The crux of the idea was to leave book classification to
| librarians, who've been studying this for years and likely doing
| a much better job than anything us silly software types could
| come up with.
|
| So to use an example from your list above, in my mental image of
| the interface I wanted: you'd pick "Sapiens" and see it
| surrounded by a cloud of other books sharing the same LoC triple
| (could use other library classification methods too). You could
| zoom out, and now see even more books sharing only the first two
| elements of the triple, or even further and end up in "History".
| Think of it as a "word cloud" made of books, rather than words.
| You could meander over to another book, and from that book zoom
| in (and out) of other aspects of the LoC's classification space.
|
| I still wish I had been able to build this, since it mirrored the
| best part of my experience in large physical bookstores. But it
| was not to be.
|
| Not sure if the dataset(s) you're using would permit this either,
| just wanted to mention it.
| bwb wrote:
| Yep, I am working on this, and it is a lot of how our system
| works under the surface. It just isn't accurate enough yet.
|
| I do use the LOC data, but only a very small % of books have
| that. I also use a NLP/ML tool called Wikifier that connects
| books to Wikidata topics as I want to use that data to help
| build knowledge graphs so readers can browse a timeline of WW2
| and also see books on those subjects.
|
| What is the problem?
|
| With the topic system, it just isn't quite accurate enough;
| once I switch over to the newer AI systems later this year, it
| should work better.
|
| With the genre system, the big problem is that the BISAC
| publishing genre system is being abused by publishers. So, the
| data is not reliable because of abuse and ignorance.
|
| For example, I have thousands of books marked nonfiction and
| fiction because the publisher doesn't know how to use the
| system and picks nonfiction topics for a fiction book. Or, a
| publisher picks a book for a genre it doesn't belong in because
| they think it will get them more sales.
|
| It is really frustrating and I am spending a huge chunk of my
| time this year to look at how I can fix it. It probably means
| ignoring this system and using AI to classify it with other
| data we have.
| hasbot wrote:
| What is the source for a book description?
|
| I ask because I just started listening to "Straight Man" by
| Richard Russo and looked it up on Shepherd. Shepherd mentions
| that "Straight Man" is being made into a TV series. That's out of
| date and Wikipedia has the up to date info (one season of a
| series based on "Straight Man" was created and called "Lucky
| Hank").
|
| Cool site! Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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(page generated 2024-04-20 23:02 UTC)